The Caretaker

The laws of the jungle ... Jonathan Pryce as Davies in The Caretaker. Photograph: Helen Warner

This production marks a multiple homecoming. It brings Jonathan Pryce back to the Liverpool stage where he learned his craft, celebrates the Pinter play that launched the Everyman in 1964 and brings Christopher Morahan back to a work he last directed in 1972. As you'd expect, it's a thoughtful, intelligent, considered piece of work even if doesn't efface memories of recent revivals.

The Caretaker

by
Harold Pinter

Everyman,

Liverpool

Until
31 October

Box office:
0151 709 4776

It's most original feature is the decision to make Pinter's hobo hero specifically Welsh. This fits in with Pryce's background and accords with a man whose name is, variously, Davies and Jenkins.

Against that, it locates a little too precisely a character of no fixed abode or identity: when asked if he's Welsh, Davies replies: "Well, I been around" as if eluding definition.

But, even if the accent is debatable, Pryce gives a first-rate performance that gradually reveals the viper lurking underneath the vagrant as he ruinously transfers his loyalty from the hospitable Aston to his hostile brother, Mick.

What is impressive about Pryce, a battered tramp with an El Greco face, is his ability to catch the sudden shifts within Pinter's character.

One minute Pryce is laughing about the memory of being spurned by a Luton monk: the next he's reliving his cry of rage as he asked the offensive priest: "What do you think I am, a wild animal?"

And this transformation provides the key to Pryce's interpretation. His Davies is full of echoes of remembered gentility as he neatly folds his trousers over a chair.

But beneath that lurks an animalistic instinct for territory and a savage cruelty: rarely have I seen the moment when Davies turns on the charitable Aston played with such violence as Pryce sadistically mocks his supposed insanity.

In Pryce's hands, Davies becomes a man who, excluded from society, lives by the laws of the jungle.

I've seen the love between the two brothers more strongly emphasised but Morahan's fine production also brings out the contradictions within them. Mick, the actual landlord, is often played as a suave manipulator.

But Tom Brooke, with his extraordinary, concave, new-moon profile, reminds us of the rage inside this upwardly mobile chancer.

He has all of Mick's brooding, intimidatory authority and fly astuteness but the moment when he smashes the Buddha replica also releases a tirade of pent-up anguish.

And Peter McDonald excellently stresses the hidden steel within the near-catatonic Aston: it's a mark of his power that when he advances on Davies, Pryce's first instinct is to nervously retreat before making futile stabbing gestures.

But what this revival confirms, above all, is the durability of Pinter's marvellous play. It is open to endless interpretations.

In the last analysis, however, it is a richly poetic work about three men in a room who are all sustained by individual pipe-dreams and hopeless illusions and at the same time are engaged in a battle for power. It's a domestic play but also, as John Gross once wrote, a deeply political one in that "its basic image of life is one of ceaseless struggle."

And, as Pryce's memorably shiftless outsider reminds us, it is a struggle in which there is only one decisive loser.